Pathfinder Society Scenario #5–03: The Hellknight's Feast (PFRPG) PDF

The second part of Matrimony.

I really love talking with NPCs, but after playing Matrimony and Merchant, the mechenics just too repeative, nothing new... and the story itself not as interesting as Merchant's Wake, you guys go to a dinner party to make friends of great nobles, then goes into a fight, very expectible.

Still recommend for RP players, good but not as shining after playing many similar PFS modules.

2016.11.12 Decreased to 3 stars, NPCs are not memorable, compare to other social scenarios. Even Honor's Echo shall be better.

A very enjoyable scenario, much in line with the Blakros Matrimony. Combats were fun and challenging, social encounters were well done. Played low tier with Slayer 5 (me), Cavalier 5, Swashbuckler 7, Ranger 6, Ninja 6.

Gameplay - Influence: The influence mechanic is pretty nearly identical to that of the Blakros Matrimony. There is a decent array of skill checks that can be used to earn favor, obviously with Diplomacy being the most important by a long shot. I had my Cha 5 Tiefling (I love bringing him to these) and there were still a few places for him to apply his skills. The only issue I always run into on these is that when you are influencing people towards a single goal, and fail your first couple checks, anyone who comes back to the same person to try again usually ends up rehashing the same argument, or just saying 'I roll diplomacy.' Even good roleplayers run out of ways to rephrase the question. Minor nitpick, thoroughly enjoyed this section anyways. (9/10)

Gameplay - Investigation: Without getting into any spoilery details, the investigation work is interwoven with the talking parts. It seems to have a pretty distinct separation from the influence parts, and some work could probably be done to intermix them a bit more in future scenarios of this type. Again, a very minor nitpick. (9/10)

Gameplay - Combat: Solid encounters. While I wouldn't say they had a major threat of killing a PC, they certainly had a threat of causing the group to expend more consumables than usual, and threat of jeopardizing the primary or secondary mission objectives. The amount of combats and quality certainly lets your Barbarians shine. The encounter setups weren't particularly interesting as there were no major hazards, but not everything needs to take place within another subsystem, so I'll give the combats a full score. (10/10)

Story: My biggest complaint is still fairly minor, but something that might be taken into account moving forward. The ostensible reason for the PCs to be at the party is to chat it up with the nobles and show that Pathfinders are cool dudes. Nothing will go wrong, just influence people. We promise. In some ways it feels a bit comical, as though someone just loudly proclaimed "I do hope nothing happens to spoil this fancy dinner party!" followed by the obviously fully expected ambush. Several members of my party had previously played in the Blakros Matrimony and Merchant's Wake, and of course being invited to a party again go into full investigation mode looking for all points of entrance, odd acting characters, and formulating defense plans for the inevitable case that security fails. At a certain point I think it may be a better idea to include some perceived threats in the briefing so the party's paranoia seems a little less idiotic and we don't need to pretend to be surprised when the baddies show up. Admit it, everyone knows it's going to happen. (8/10)

Duration: Depending on how all of the skill checks and exploration go I could see the scenario running long, but we finished in about 4.5 hours with full marks. A couple of the enemies can possibly bring more into the fray, and our party prevented that from happening. If it wasn't for that I could see the scenario take much longer as well. (8/10)

Final score: 44/50 (4.5/5 stars?)
If you liked Blakros Matrimony and Merchant's Wake, you'll like this scenario as well. I certainly recommend playing it.

It's clear that this scenario is the result of Paizo gaining experience in writing these "social occasion with inevitable surprise attack" stories. Lessons learned from Immortal Conundrum, Among the Living and Blakros Matrimony. In particular, this scenario gracefully dances around frustrations about being allowed to carry weaponry;

Also, because you can influence NPCs both with traditional social skills but also with other skills relating to their fields of interest, most PCs will get a chance to contribute in a meaningful way to that.

I played this adventure with my investigator, who's been around quite a bit, and already had connections to some of the people present. And he's a Blakros. So my stats for this were through the roof. The paladin was effective as well of course. (And if you look at the cover of the scenario, you can guess having a paladin along might be nice...) The rogue/warpriest/alchemist gaggle in our party had a bit harder time influencing NPCs, but they did good groundwork ferreting out information about them, which then allowed us to more effectively diplomacize them. As a weird team we were quite effective at this.

What I also liked is that by now you're considered serious adventurers; you're not wannabes anymore, you've probably beaten some demons before so you're actually a credible person here.

Also very nice is that the NPCs here have sufficient depth and talking points that there is actually quite a bit to talk about; if you figure out who and what you are you can come up with much more compelling arguments than "look closely at this D20". This much conversational material is much harder to find in other scenarios, I think.

And then there's the investigation part of things. The investigation is actually challenging; you have to think and work to find clues and get an idea of what is going on. Depending on how well you do at that you can prevent some of the damage the bad guys are hoping to do.

As for the combat: just because this is a social scenario doesn't mean the combats are just some stuff added in. These are pretty vicious monsters; I'd say the combats are slightly above average and the final fight is significantly above-average in danger. Our saving grace was that because I fought the main boss alone (it already dropped a PC) it wasn't using its pretty horrific stuff on the other PCs or we'd have been toast. That and a lucky hit/iterative crit round where my investigator longspeared for 120 damage; didn't even give the boss a chance to switch from trying to kill me to hoping to escape.

The take away message: this is a scenario that will challenge you socially, with investigation, and with serious combat.

It also runs WAY long; we had no big digressions or breaks but it was still 8 hours. Totally worth it.

Be sure to play the Blackros Matrimony before you play this. Really great two parter.